Henne, Kathryn (Author)
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Volume: 39, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 787-812
This essay reflects on the history of gender verification regulations aimed at female athletes in international sport and the justification for this practice under the rationale that it protects fair play in women's sport. Beginning with the most recent guidelines for women participants proposed in 2011 following the controversy around the 800-meter world champion runner Caster Semenya, this analysis looks at the politics---gendered, scientific, and international in nature---of policing sex in women's events through the use of scientific testing. To do so, the article traces the ideological underpinnings of fair play in Olympic sport and the development of international guidelines, providing a historiographic reading of the International Olympic Committee Medical Commission's early work in this field during the 1960s, subsequent changes to this regulation, and their implications. In advancing this argument, I contend that to date the science aimed at preserving a steadfast binary has only provided evidence to the contrary. Science has yet to prove that female sex is definitive, and its recommendations have in part come to reflect that recognition. The recent revisiting of gender verification protocols nonetheless suggests the technocratic desire for a formation of sex that reflects binary constructions of gender, attesting to the continued power of heteronormative orders in this field and beyond.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Rupert, James L.;
(2011)
Genitals to Genes: The History and Biology of Gender Verification in the Olympics
(/isis/citation/CBB001250798/)
Book
Reis, Elizabeth;
(2009)
Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex
(/isis/citation/CBB001020415/)
Book
King, Helen;
(2013)
The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence
(/isis/citation/CBB001421664/)
Chapter
Sorin, Claire;
(2011)
Anatomy of the Female Angel or Science at the Service of Woman in Woman and Her Era by Eliza Farnham
(/isis/citation/CBB001221548/)
Thesis
Eder, Sandra;
(2011)
The Birth of Gender: Clinical Encounters with Hermaphroditic Children at Johns Hopkins (1940--1956)
(/isis/citation/CBB001567298/)
Article
Thomas, Marion;
(2014)
Are Women Naturally Devoted Mothers? Fabre, Perrier, and Giard on Maternal Instinct in France under the Third Republic
(/isis/citation/CBB001420019/)
Article
Ketil Slagstad;
(2022)
Bureaucratizing Medicine: Creating a Gender Identity Clinic in the Welfare State
(/isis/citation/CBB804149903/)
Article
Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst;
Luna Dolezal;
(2018)
Cosmetic Surgery as "Cut-Up": The Body and Gender in Breyer P-Orridge's Pandrogeny
(/isis/citation/CBB410641240/)
Thesis
Michael Pfeiffer;
(2016)
Whose Gender? Whose Identity? Trans Medicine, Psychiatry, and the Symbolic Order
(/isis/citation/CBB729191686/)
Chapter
Marta Cavazza;
(2015)
La scienza al femminile
(/isis/citation/CBB108003953/)
Article
Alter, Joseph S.;
(2007)
Yoga and Physical Education: Swami Kuvalayananda's Nationalist Project
(/isis/citation/CBB000850166/)
Chapter
Endo, Yukihide;
(2011)
Women and Science in Japanese Anime: A Challenge to the Traditional Construction of Female Identity
(/isis/citation/CBB001221558/)
Thesis
Jeffrey W. Lockhart;
(2022)
Establishing Sex: The Scientific Quest to Support a Controversial Binary
(/isis/citation/CBB013149328/)
Book
Rene Almeling;
(2020)
GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health
(/isis/citation/CBB484332667/)
Article
Bittel, Carla Jean;
(2005)
Science, Suffrage, and Experimentation: Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Controversy over Vivisection in Late Nineteenth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB000800010/)
Article
Ticktin, Miriam;
(2011)
The Gendered Human of Humanitarianism: Medicalising and Politicising Sexual Violence
(/isis/citation/CBB001212656/)
Article
Elsa Vitale;
Francesca Di Dio;
(2020)
Historical gender gap in the authorship of the most impacted general nursing journals: A cohort descriptive study
(/isis/citation/CBB655319055/)
Article
Judy Z Segal;
(August 2018)
Sex, drugs, and rhetoric: The case of flibanserin for ‘female sexual dysfunction’
(/isis/citation/CBB311917478/)
Article
Martin Butler;
Sina Farzin;
Michael Fuchs;
(2021)
PandemIcons? The Medical Scientist as Iconic Figure in Times of Crisis
(/isis/citation/CBB262220114/)
Book
Fisher, Jill A.;
(2011)
Gender and the science of difference: cultural politics of contemporary science and medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB520774775/)
Be the first to comment!